EVE Online Gets the Zenith Quadrant

With the new quarter we get a new Quandrant in New Eden.  Today’s update brought us the third quadrant, called Zenith.

Zenith means it is all down hill from here

The main item for the update are the new Proving Ground filaments.  Covered in a dev blog, these essentially allow PvP players to skip doing an Abyssal deadspace run in order to get to the proving ground pocket where you have to blow up the other side in order to claim the rewards and leave.

CCP is also planning to run a series of events based on these new filaments with specific ship restrictions.  There will also be leader boards and different combat formats, including 1v1, 2v2, 3v3, 5v5, and 5 player free-for-all.

This release also sees EDENCOM ships and skills, introduced with the June update and only available through special event sites, now available more generally.  The basic skills can now be purchased directly from your character sheet, while blueprints for ships, modules, and ammunition, along with the tech II specialization and encryption skills, are now available through the DED LP.  Modules will now also drop from EDENCOM wrecks in Triglavian conflict sites.

The update also saw a round of tiericide around armor resistance plating.  This pass normalizes the naming scheme (they are all now called “coating” rather than “plating”) and aligns progression of resistance applied to line up with past passes on other resistance reworks.  This means everybody’s armor fits will need to be updated.  The long list of modules and their new stats are available in the patch notes.

CCP has also made changes to its perpetual login campaign.  The daily rewards, criticized for their lack of appeal… single run, un-researched blueprint copies and extremely short duration boosters that are consumed on redemption… have been updated:

• New rewards have been added.
• The quality of the Boosters has been increased.
• The researched level for BPCs has been improved.

No word on the new rewards, but that is a move in the right direction for BPCs and boosters.

Boosters may also now be redeemed in space, so you can consume them when you might need them and not in a station where their duration usually means they will have worn off by the time you’re in a situation to need their help.

And, finally, there were the usual round of defect fixes rolled into the release.

The update has been rolled out and is live.  The details can be found in the patch notes.